No Cave Instancing in ARK ASA?

[Zapha]

While exploring the cave play of ARK ASA I come now to the conclusion that ARK ASA has no cave instancing like the old ARK ASE had. That means near caves or in caves my client PC has to calculate two worlds, the cave world and the outer world, at the same time, which leads to bad lag if in or near caves.

The old ARK ASE had a very smooth transition when entering the cave instance. You had a small stutering while entering the cave and a great performance boost in the cave, because the outer world was not calculated there.

I'm not sure about the Unreal engine, but as player I have the experience that you mostly get a loading bar screen while changing instances in Unreal engine based games. It's a powerful engine, but it has difficulties to hide instance transitions.

What say the experts? Am I wrong? Because for me as player it has the consequence to avoid not only cave play but also regions near caves. Maybe in five years my future PC will be able to handle all the load.

[Pipinghot]

9 hours ago, Zapha said:

While exploring the cave play of ARK ASA I come now to the conclusion that ARK ASA has no cave instancing like the old ARK ASE had. That means near caves or in caves my client PC has to calculate two worlds, the cave world and the outer world, at the same time, which leads to bad lag if in or near caves.

I'm going to speculate here, it's fairly educated speculation but nonetheless I still fully admit that I'm speculating, so take this however you wish.

I don't see any reason to believe that they would have spent the time & money to write new code that changes how caves & instancing work. The only reason for them to make any changes to this specific function would be if it failed when they imported it into UE5 and they were forced to recode it.

Having said that, if cave instancing failed after importing to UE5 then I would expect a whole lot more of the game to fail as well, so I'm going to make an educated guess and say that this is still the same code and the same general logic, I believe that caves are instanced the same way they used to be.

9 hours ago, Zapha said:

That means near caves or in caves my client PC has to calculate two worlds, the cave world and the outer world, at the same time, which leads to bad lag if in or near caves.

If you're (consistently) experiencing lag near caves that you didn't experience in ASE, I'm at a loss to think of a good explanation for that. Just out of curiosity, how much have you tested that idea? Have you, just to think of an example, jumped on a flying mount and flown around near the entrance of multiple different caves with just you and your single mount? How close do you have to get before the lag starts? How long does it last? If you fly around near the entrance does it happen over and over, or just one time as you approach the cave?

I'm not trying to cast doubt on what you're saying, just trying to get a better understanding of what you're experiencing.

Regarding the second part, experiencing bad lag while you're inside caves, I've seen a number of people complain about that, including a friend of mine who experineces it when he is playing in single-player. Then again he has unexplained lag spikes at various times just playing the game normally, so he doesn't have any good insights into whether this is entirely caused by being in the cave.

I will also say, it has always been my experience that there is more lag in caves than on the surface, and it wouldn't surprise me if this is worse for many people in ASA. Unfortunately "laginess" is something that's hard to measure so at this time all we have are a bunch of different feelings from people about whether caves are worse or not.

9 hours ago, Zapha said:

The old ARK ASE had a very smooth transition when entering the cave instance. You had a small stutering while entering the cave and a great performance boost in the cave, because the outer world was not calculated there.

It has never been my experience that cave transitions were smooth, but for reference I've done all my playing on official servers and private dedicated servers. I've never played the same in single-player nor have I played on a non-dedicated server. I also have never experienced any performance boosts in caves, not on official and not on dedicated server.

If I remember correctly you play single-player, is that right?

9 hours ago, Zapha said:

because the outer world was not calculated there.

This might be true on single-player in ASE, but it's not true on a server, which is why I'm asking what mode(s) you play.

9 hours ago, Zapha said:

I'm not sure about the Unreal engine, but as player I have the experience that you mostly get a loading bar screen while changing instances in Unreal engine based games. It's a powerful engine, but it has difficulties to hide instance transitions.

All game engines can have difficulties with instance transitions, it just depends on how the game is written. I realize that's a vague answer, but this one sentence alone could require a long and technical discussion. For the purposes of this discussion I think the best answer is, "it can happen to any game, on any engine, it just depends on how things were written."

Having said that, it would not be surprising if transitions are more laggy now than they were in ASE, because they ported code that was written in UE4 to UE5 and any time a game is ported to a new game engine there can be a variety of odd behaviors. Some functions run better, some run the same, some run worse, and code that was heavily optimized to run well under UE4 might need to be re-optimized to run well under UE5. UE5 is backwards compatible with UE4, but that doesn't automatically mean that things run better or even the same, some aspects of the game can run worse.

9 hours ago, Zapha said:

Maybe in five years my future PC will be able to handle all the load.

Also, if you're using the same computer to run ASA that you used to run ASE, then I would expect the game to perform worse in a variety of unpredictable ways. A brand new game written from the ground up and optimized for UE5 might perform better on your computer, but an old game that's ported from UE4 to UE5 should be expected to perform worse, at first, until the developer eventually gets around to finding all of the performance problems and fixing them. As discussed, UE5 is backwards compatible with UE4 but that doesn't automatically mean that every aspect of the game will run as well.

[Randy12]

no ur right, the lag in caves is terrible,  i have a 4070 and have to turn down the settings inside caves, and getting a note inside the cave is a frameout/possible crash 

 

[yarnevk]

They seem to be using their ATLAS seemless transitions, that lets you sail from one island to another - unloading and loading a new island at lat/long crossing.  It was essentially an advanced version of ARKs obelisk server clusters.  The same seamless level crossing is being made available in the updated dev kit that will allow you to make your own games.

Now if you ever played ATLAS you know 'seamless' usually meant a massive fps hitch, to the point they would have been better off with loading screens.     The cave transition has the exact same hitch.

But caves being bad performance are more to do with lots of terrain geometry, lots of glowing flora, lots of concentrated fauna.  You would get the same low frames if you spawned a bunch of drops and dinos around you up on the island.

Edited January 18 by yarnevk

[Randy12]

no its a cave problem, lightning is turned off in low settings. even with the cave near bare in settings it still frames

 

[Zapha]

 

21 hours ago, Pipinghot said:

If you're (consistently) experiencing lag near caves that you didn't experience in ASE, I'm at a loss to think of a good explanation for that. Just out of curiosity, how much have you tested that idea?

 

For a while I farmed white pearls at the west coast in the icy area, and I always wondered why there is so much lag allthough there is no djungle near. Now that I tried the Cave of Lost Faith there with my Basilo, an underwater cave, I think that cave is the reason for the lag. Patch note said they fixed some client crashes, so I tried the cave on DX12, but still too much crashes.

I gave it up now with caves and come to the hard conclusion that 80% of the map are unplayable for me. the whole inner country with the djungle, and the caves. Maybe one day they have fixed all the client crashes, but until then I play only on the small stripe outside.

[Pipinghot]

3 hours ago, Zapha said:

For a while I farmed white pearls at the west coast in the icy area, and I always wondered why there is so much lag allthough there is no djungle near. Now that I tried the Cave of Lost Faith there with my Basilo, an underwater cave, I think that cave is the reason for the lag. Patch note said they fixed some client crashes, so I tried the cave on DX12, but still too much crashes.

I gave it up now with caves and come to the hard conclusion that 80% of the map are unplayable for me. the whole inner country with the djungle, and the caves. Maybe one day they have fixed all the client crashes, but until then I play only on the small stripe outside.

It's starting to sound like @yarnevkhit it, and that WC did change the code/instancing for caves in ASA. Would be interesting if someone could find confirmation about whether this change is included in ASA.